Gamification

Success of any software depends on its buy-in from users. In today’s cut-throat competition era, keeping users actively involved and engages with your application is tricky job. A user will remain engaged with your application in following cases:

• Your app provides some unique features which no other app in world currently provides and will not provide, we all know it’s impossible
• Users should have fun using your app

Surely we don’t create app for only fun, they always have some serious business case behind it. The only software we create for fun is game. Then why don’t we try to adopt gaming concepts in our software to ensure user engagement, it’s called “Gamification”.

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage users. Many consumer-oriented web and mobile apps have started adopting this concept to encourage people to adopt apps. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviours, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

Some of the techniques in gamification include:

• achievement “badges”
• achievement levels
• virtual currency
• challenges between users
• embedding small casual games within other activities
• systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points

stackoverflow.com and its sister sites is one of the best example today.

I think there is no fixed set of techniques in gamification. If you understand main motive behind gamification, anything which makes your app’s user experience delightful can be called as gamification. In fact some people argue that gamification is already since long in terms of techniques like happy hours, loyalty program, etc.

You will observe that even though this term has been introduced to world recently, this technique has been used since long time. I remember one web app (I don’t remember its name now) I used long time ago to upload some huge files, it used to show a small random puzzles & quotes on (usually boring) “uploading file, please wait” progress dialog. You see even though I already forgot site name, but not this small innovative idea, this is called as fun user experience.